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The senior officer added he'd seen vision of girls fighting believed to be connected to the incident.

Members of the public reported youths armed with baseball bats, Mr Hansen said.

Three people from the incident had been identified and police are confident of "a solution for us today or in coming days".

The melee involved up to 30 Sudanese Australians from Melbourne's south and north, police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said.

"You can call them gangs ... but if you think of them as gangs it's not the way we tend to respond to them as they don't have the traditional thing that we think groups have," he told ABC radio.

"These are groups that use social media."

South Sudanese community representative Maker Mayek labelled the event "regrettable".

"No-one should feel unsafe in their homes. I've seen people saying their children were terrified. This is an absolutely horrific thing to see," he told Sky News.

"It's not the African community, it's not the Africans in general, these are young people from the South Sudanese community and we want to make it clear no one condones their actions," Mr Mayek told Sky News on Thursday.